Sacramento voters reject electronic voting machines for paper-and-pencil ballots
by Cameron Jahn, Sacramento Bee
Jan. 24, 2004
Commentary: Saramento County has decided to purchase optical scan readers.
The scanners, like the ones used to score standardized tests, read pencil marks made inside bubbles on the ballot form. Unlike electronic voting machines, optical scanning machines leave a paper record of all ballots cast, have a proven track record in other locations, have a low failure rate, and are not extremely susceptible to tampering.
In addition, they cost only $80,000, while the touch-screen voting machines' price tag is over $11 million.
=Madeline Zane= |
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Sacramento County is taking the slow road to voting reform, using a paper-and-pencil system for the March 2 primary to replace the discredited punch-card machines that were at the center of the voting fiasco in the 2000 presidential election in Florida.
County elections officials are in no hurry, given the questions, hurdles and controversy surrounding the ultimate goal of having electronic touch-screen voting machines in all precincts statewide by 2005.
"I'm comfortable voting on a touch-screen machine and that my vote will be counted accurately, but there are questions out there from people who don't feel comfortable with it," said Jill Lavine, the county's registrar of voters. "The money (we're planning to spend) is huge, but more importantly, I don't want to lose my voters' confidence because once you lose that, it takes years to get it back."
Instead of buying touch-screen voting machines for at least $11 million, Sacramento County spent about $80,000 to convert its old punch-card machines into optical-scan machines, which use ballots similar to standardized test forms with boxes to fill in next to numbered choices.
All Sacramento County voters in the March 2 primary election -- and most voters in the November presidential election -- will cast ballots on the optical-scan system.
Elections officials nationwide have 18 months to install at least one touch-screen voting machine per polling place in order to comply with federal regulations and receive part of the $2.3 billion in federal money earmarked for the change-over.
According to a report released last week by the Washington-based Election Reform Information Project, many election reforms required to be in place before the 2004 election will not happen until 2006 because of federal money that has been slow to arrive and security concerns surrounding touch-screen voting machines.
Election watchdogs in California, however, say the state is moving too quickly toward the electronic frontier of voting without ensuring that touch-screen machines are equipped with enough security measures to prevent vote tampering.
All California voters must be guaranteed the option of independently verifying their votes by 2006 via a paper receipt before their votes are counted. But voters in at least 12 counties will mark their choices in March on machines that do not produce a hard copy. Touch-screen machines are required, however, to print out a paper record of the ballots cast when the polls close.
The absence of a paper trail verified by each voter could open the door to election rigging if records are stored only on computer hard drives, said Kim Alexander, president of the Davis-based California Voter Foundation.
The democratic process could be compromised if counties fail to install the proper system the first time around, she said.
"We're not talking about minor changes, but 14,000 machines put into place this March and an investment of over $45,000,000," she said. "It's likely those voters will be using those machines for a long time."
Disability advocates say they still are not happy with the paper trail concept because it bars the blind from verifying their votes without help from another person, which is required by the 2001 federal election reform law.
"All this is going to serve to delay our ability to vote independently for the first time ever," said Dan Kysor, a legislative advocate for the California Council of the Blind.
At least a dozen counties already have touch-screen voting systems, although those machines may be retrofitted later to print a voter-verified paper trail.
San Joaquin County recently spent $5.7 million on 1,625 Diebold TSx touch-screen voting machines to use in the March primary. Despite recent concerns about the security of the Ohio-based company's software, it's too late to change vendors now, said Deborah Hench, San Joaquin County's registrar of voters. "At this point, this election has to be run on this system," she said. "That's the system we have."
Dozens of protesters demonstrated this week in Solano and San Diego counties when touch-screen machines that do not produce a paper trail were introduced. They called for county supervisors to require voter-verified paper trails immediately.
Elections officials in Mendocino County will not use their 73 new Diebold touch-screen machines until the vendor can outfit them with a voter-verified paper trail.
"How they will do it, no one knows," said Anne Holden, assistant registrar of voters.
Sacramento County already has a bit of experience with touch-screen voting and paper trails. Before the November 2002 statewide election, 1,600 Sacramento County voters became the first in the country to cast ballots on a touch-screen machine that produced a paper trail. New Jersey-based Avante International Technology displayed its touch-screen machines at city halls and state buildings countywide.
Sacramento County elections officials will wait until after the March primary to put out a bid for as many as 5,000 touch-screen voting machines. Voters may be allowed to vote on the new machines two weeks before the November election.
The county plans to spend as much as $20 million on machines that produce a paper trail that voters can verify, even though the state has not released criteria to choose such machines.
"(The contract) will probably be pretty vague, like will you be able to meet the state's standards, whatever they may be," Lavine said. "They'll have to raise their right hand and swear."
Published by
Sacramento Bee
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New voting machines not certified
by
Rebecca Helmes, Richmond [IN] Palladium-Item
Jan. 24, 2004
Election Systems & Software is working fast to update Wayne County's touchscreen voting machines after the Indiana Election Commission found the company's products in at least three counties were not certified with the state.
The Indiana Election Commission is issuing a subpoena to ES&s, requiring the company explain why it provided Wayne, Henry and Johnson counties, and possibly three more counties, with voting equipment that had not been certified as accurate and approved for use in Indiana.
Members of the Indiana Election Division discovered these counties were using a version of touchscreen firmware -- an essential part of the system that falls between hardware and software -- that had not been approved for use in Indiana. The discovery was made while going through applications for reimbursement funds for the new election systems.
Wayne County Clerk Sue Anne Lower said although the equipment was not certified in the state of Indiana, the equipment had been approved at the federal level.
She said the equipment did not affect the election's outcome.
The Wayne County attorney and commissioners have been notified of the problem, and Lower hopes the certified firmware is completely installed in the voting machines by Tuesday.
Wayne County has not paid anything for the voting machines yet. The county won't pay ES&S until state and federal reimbursements come in.
The state is sending out nearly $4 million in reimbursements to 10 counties, with none of the money going to Wayne, Henry or Johnson counties.
"I assume we will be on the list (to receive reimbursement) once the firmware has been corrected," Lower said.
Lower said she did not know before the election that the firmware version used here was not certified.
To get approved, the firmware will have to be tested by an independent laboratory. ES&S had applied in August to have the firmware approved but the commission couldn't grant approval without the correct certification.
There is no penalty for using uncertified equipment in Indiana.
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Richmond [IN] Palladium-Item |
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Voting machine proposals kept from public view
by Mark Naymik, The Plain Dealer [Cleveland]
Jan. 25, 2004
Companies trying to sell Cuyahoga County millions of dollars worth of new voting machines don't want voters to see their proposals.
And county elections officials are reluctant to reveal details, saying the county could get in trouble for disclosing the companies' "trade secrets."
The Plain Dealer requested in December to review proposals submitted by the companies -- Diebold Elections Systems, Election Systems & Software, Hart Intercivic and Sequoia Voting Systems -- and any internal county Board of Elections documents related to the proposals.
The winner will get the state's largest voting-machine contract, worth more than $20 million.
To date, the board has not turned over any proposals or materials that offer insight into exactly what the companies are trying to sell the agency beyond what Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell has already negotiated on behalf of the county.
Blackwell and the companies have agreed on the price of electronic voting machines, warranties, servicing contracts and the cost of training poll workers and voters to use the machines. And Blackwell has published all of the price information on his office's Web site.
Michael Vu, the county's elections chief, said the board is trying to negotiate for computers and items needed to run the voting systems, additional staff training and items needed to store the machines in the county's warehouse.
The board has not turned over any documents that explain these items in detail, nor has the board or its attorney offered any explanation of how the disclosure of such items might betray a trade secret.
"If it wasn't for the objections of the vendors, we would be willing to give them to you," Vu said. "Three out of the four vendors have objected to releasing the information, and the board would be liable if we released it."
He said Hart Intercivic may be willing to release its proposal.
Bill Stotesbery, vice president of marketing for Hart Intercivic, referred questions to the elections board, saying, "There are some things in our standard proposal that we consider trade secrets."
Becky Vollmer, a spokeswoman for Election Systems & Software, said the company is willing to release the information only after the contract is awarded.
"Our expectation is that the county treat each vendor's submittal -- and the competitive information included in it -- confidentially until an award is issued," she said.
Representatives from the other companies were reached but did not respond to specific questions before deadline.
Plain Dealer Editor Doug Clifton said the proposals should be open to public view.
"Openness in awarding multimillion-dollar contracts is essential to earn the public's trust," he said. "Why is the county so reluctant to share this basic information with the voters?"
While the federal government has set aside money for the items negotiated by Blackwell, county taxpayers would pay for additional items. The elections board also wants to purchase more machines than Blackwell has authorized and will have to pay for them with county tax dollars.
Published by
The Plain Dealer [Cleveland]
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Expert urges defeat of feds’ e-voting system
by Jakob Schiller, Berkeley [CA] Daily Planet
Jan. 27, 2004
Washington should abandon a new Internet-based system designed to facilitate voting for American citizens overseas, declared a panel of top computer experts-including UC Berkeley professor David Wagner-in a recently issued report.
Wagner-along with Aviel Rubin, an associate professor of computer science from John Hopkins University, David Jefferson, from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Barbara Simons, a Bay Area technology consultant-say the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) has several important security risks and should not be used to tally votes during trial runs that are set to take place during the upcoming primary and general elections.
Mandated by Congress and overseen by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Federal Voting Assistance Program , SERVE was designed to eliminate problems associated with the absentee ballot process that proponents say continually disenfranchise voters.
But the authors of the Jan. 21 report say the new technology, while well intentioned, poses a series of severe risks.
"Broadly, SERVE poses a much larger chance of election fraud than anything we have today," said Wagner, a computer security expert.
The firestorm over touchscreen voting systems identified a number of serious risks associated with computer voting. SERVE, say the authors, intensifies those risks by introducing using the Internet and personal computers.
"Because SERVE is an Internet and PC-based system," the authors say in their report, "it has numerous other fundamental security problems that leave it vulnerable to a variety of well-known cyber attacks…any one of which could be catastrophic."
Threats include insider attacks, denial of service attacks, spoofing, automated vote buying, and viral attacks.
According to Barbara Simons, attacks could disenfranchise large sections of the 100,000 U.S. citizens (registered in seven states and currently residing in 50 countries around the world) who are scheduled to use SERVE in this year’s elections.
"[The Internet and PCs] were never designed to be secure," said Simons.
In the report, the authors briefly describe the history of the Internet, stressing that its original construction did not emphasize security. Security barriers have been built to guard certain transactions, they said, but not Internet voting.
"For all the importance of security today, the Internet has no general security architecture; in fact it is well known to be full of general vulnerabilities," they wrote.
As a result, attacks can be launched by someone with a relatively low skill level, and in a way that is unnoticeable. "These attacks can be perpetrated from everywhere; it could be some teenage kid, political party, political opponent, etc.," said Simons.
Unlike other Internet transactions, such as e-commerce and e-banking-both of which the report says are relatively secure-the e-voting process poses unaccountable security risks.
People "assume that voting is comparable somehow to an online financial transaction, whereas in fact security for Internet voting is far more difficult than security for e-commerce," they write.
Additional e-voting risks include the inability to confirm correct transactions because of voter anonymity rules. Unlike e-commerce, where a customer can double-check transactions by referring back to receipts or order statements, a voter has no way to confirm that a choice was tallied correctly.
As with touchscreen voting machines, voters using SERVE will receive confirmation that their vote was received by the polling place where they vote. But how the vote was counted can’t be confirmed because it would breach privacy rules.
Any number of possible attacks could produce a vote switch, Simons said. A virus received by the PC could easily switch the selection after it was confirmed by the voter but before it was sent. The vote would be tallied and the virus could erase itself, leaving no trace.
"Viruses and worms go around every week, and virus check software only works on known viruses," said Simons.
A denial of service attack would simply overload the election web server with junk e-mail, preventing it from counting votes.
In their report the authors diagram the skill level needed to create all the different attacks and their possible severity. Most range from low to medium skill level and all result in large-scale disenfranchisement.
Accenture, the company in charge of SERVE’s design, stresses that the report is only a minority report, part of a larger analysis also conducted by six other people, none of whom have yet issued their own reports.
At least one of the other participants in the program, Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at Cal Tech, supports the project and says its design will help alleviate other, more severe problems that plague the absentee system.
"The way in which overseas people vote is an arcane voting system, it’s disenfranchising," said Alvarez.
He said absentee ballots often arrive late at polling places or get jumbled in with an accumulating bundle of bulk mail that eventually is postmarked after the deadline. Small errors that are usually caught at the polling place, he says, also continually disqualify ballots.
Criticism of SERVE, founded or not, he says, is directed at the wrong place.
"We are not following the problems that already exist," he said, and cited SERVE as a possible solution.
He also stresses SERVE as a pilot program, meant to test results. One hundred thousand voters out of an estimated six million people living overseas, he says, is a small enough group to mitigate any kind of major interference.
But it’s still too many for Simons, who points out that the 2000 general election was decided by a precipitously small number. She, along with Wagner, also stresses the importance of realizing that the technology has severe security problems that can’t be corrected with existing measures. Regardless of the security devices put in place by Accenture, there will be holes.
"That’s the most disappointing part," said Wagner. "After a lot of effort [to explore the system’s possibilities] we found that it is just not a possibility. It would require major changes to the architecture of the Internet and PCs.
"We’re not saying that Internet voting is some evil that should never be used. The technology just isn’t ready yet."
Another concern cited by the authors is SERVE’s future expansion. They worry that once the system is adopted it will expand, increasing the dangers associated with it.
The report has boosted the issue into the public forum, seemingly more quickly than the controversy surrounding touchscreen voting machines-an issue which hasn’t received much coverage until recently.
Tellingly, the New York Times editorialized last Friday for Congress to suspend the program:
"The intentions behind the Pentagon’s plan, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, are laudable…but the advantages of the Pentagon’s Internet voting system would be far outweighed by the dangers it would pose."
At the end of their report the authors praise the project’s directors, who they say have done everything in their power to ensure a secure system.
"[The project managers] have been completely aware all along of the security problems we have described here, and we have been impressed with the engineering sophistication and skill they have devoted to attempts to ameliorate or eliminate them."
But, said Wagner, "They are in a tough position-they’ve been told to solve an un-solvable problem."
Published by
Berkeley [CA] Daily Planet
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